Welsh Journals

which covers questions of church and state at Westminster in these mid-nineteenth-century years in a way which will surely make it in its turn a standard work. But has Dr. Machin really done justice to this topic, to say nothing of the wider one of his title? The blurb tells us that he has 'tried to explore the issues more deeply than his predecessors, and to display interrelations where hitherto the questions have generally been treated in isolation'. Arguably, however, it is precisely depth of analysis and integration into general history which are lacking here. The now abundant literature on the sociology of church-state relationships is ignored; and the changes in the legal position of dissenters from the established church are most certainly not integrated into the wider pattern of change in English law in this period. In short, this is an essen- tially traditional treatment of a traditional topic; it offers no comparative insights, no mentalites, and no sociology-whether political or religious. Some may feel this is all to the good. This book is not seminal, but it is solid; not profound, but thorough; and in the later 1970s these are quali- ties often rated more highly than they have been in recent years. OLIVE ANDERSON Westfield College, London LAND AND PEOPLE IN Nineteenth-Century WALES. By David W. Howell. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. Pp. 207. £ 6.95. David W. Howell's book is a valuable and scholarly contribution to agrarian history. It is primarily based on the archives of large estates and on parliamentary enquiries such as the 1874 Return of Landowners and the Royal Commission on Welsh Land of the 1890s. This material has been well utilized to illuminate such matters as the character of land holdings, tenurial relations, marketing and farm practices. The official or landlord provenance of much of the evidence has resulted in a study somewhat narrower in scope than the title suggests. Genuine 'grass-roots' evidence is notoriously difficult to come by; perhaps more might have been culled from the newspapers, not to mention Welsh-language sources. But if the book is essentially an economic study it does deal with issues which were central to political and social developments as well. Thus, Dr. Howell's book should be read by all students of modern Welsh history. The most controversial and significant conclusion of the study is that the 'Welsh land question' was largely an invention of Welsh nonconformist radicalism and based on 'anti-landlord allegations which had no basis in fact'. In particular, Dr. Howell exonerates the large landowners from the charges levelled at them by the nonconformist radical leaders. The large landowners resided on their estates, they provided most of the capital for agricultural improvements, they kept rents relatively low and they very rarely evicted their tenants for political or religious reasons. By comparison, the new owners of smaller estates treated their tenants much more harshly, since they had less acquaintance with rural traditions and